The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925-1926

Hans B. Neumann is a history lecturer at Scarborough College, University
of Toronto.

In 1933, Mykola Khvylovy, the Ukrainian intellectual who is the subject of this book, took his own life at the age of forty. He was a victim, as were so many of his countrymen, of the turbulent events that swept his homeland in the wake of the 1917 revolutions. Khvylovy had participated in the many heated debates that preceded the extraction of a policy of Ukrainization from the Bolshevik Soviet leadership in May 1925. The heyday of this policy lasted only three years. Thereafter the new victor in Moscow, Josef Stalin, ruthlessly crushed both the policy and its supporters. But this did not happen before Khvylovy had become the foremost spokesman for a Ukrainian cultural revolution.

This book makes available (for the first time in English) three of Khvylovy’s major polemical pamphlets dating from this period: Quo Vadis, Thoughts against the Current, Apologists of Scribbling as well as a fragment of Ukraine or Little Russia? These selections are preceded by a lengthy, erudite, detailed introduction by Professor Shkandrij of the University of Ottawa who also edited and translated the source material. Helpful to the non-specialist reader is a glossary of the often confusing acronyms, terms, and abbreviations originating from the history of this period. The book is replete with all the scholarly trappings and thoroughness one has come to expect of works published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Edmonton.

Scholars in Ukrainian studies, as well as cultural historians not versed in the Slavic languages, will no doubt welcome the availability of this new source material. For the general reader, Khvylovy’s tragic life may serve as a potent example of the more often than not volatile mix represented by literature, culture, and politics.